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Primoz Bozic

Why my first two blogs never turned into profitable online businesses

By Primoz Bozic Leave a Comment

I see so many of my readers struggle with growing their online businesses these days. They say things like:

  • “I’ve spent last 24 months working on my business without earning anything. I tried everything I was “supposed” to do and got my email list to 236 email subscribers, but the progress is too slow. I sometimes get 14 email subscribers from a guest post and sometimes 0. I feel like it will take years to get anywhere with my business.”
  • “I built a product, launched it, and got ZERO customers. Then I rebuild it from scratch and confidently launched it again. This time results really shocked me – I’ve got zero customers AGAIN! What am I missing?”
  • “It’s super frustrating to hear success stories from other people of how they grew their email lists and got their first paying customers with their business idea. I wonder, What am I doing wrong?”

I can relate to them, because just a few years ago, I was in the exact same place as them.
Before I was able to build a successful online business, I struggled for months – and today I’ll reveal some of the frustrating details of starting my journey as an online entrepreneur.

My first (and most frustrating) experience with blogging

A few years ago, when I saw how many other people were using their blogs to run successful online businesses, I said to myself “hey, I could do this too!”.

I started my own blog, and called it “Skyrocket Your Productivity”, where I wanted to help people become more productive in their lives.

I shelled out $500 to get a website designed because I thought that’s what would make my blog a success (I was a bit naive at the time):

Then I started writing blog post after blog post to build an audience for my business.

I wrote about books I’ve read:

I wrote about random things that I’ve found interesting:

I even tried writing “daily productivity tips” for 2 weeks:

I put hundreds of hours into creating new content over the course of 6 months, and I really felt like I gave it my all.

There was just one problem – my blog wasn’t going ANYWHERE.
After spending 6 months writing, my email list never grew past 46 email subscribers (and most of them were my friends and family). I thought I was creating valuable content, but nobody really seemed to care about it, and my blog wasn’t rapidly growing like I wanted it to grow, and like I thought it would grow.

I didn’t make any money with my blog either.

I tried to monetize my blog by getting people to buy books that I’ve read through affiliate links, but I never even got enough affiliate revenues to withdraw my money from Amazon (I think you had to earn a minimum of $15 to do that).

I’ve spent hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours to start my own online business, but the results just weren’t coming in. The worst part was that I didn’t know why, and that frustrated me.

Eventually, after I really felt like I tried everything, I became so discouraged that I shut down my blog and moved on:

My second shot at blogging: Different niche, similar story

Since my blog never took off, I thought the “niche” was the problem.

I decided to go back to a niche that I was already familiar with and making money from (productivity for online poker players), and I started a website called “High Stakes Mindset” with a friend of mine where we aspired to teach online poker players how to develop a better mindset.

Over the next few months we blogged there, and as I was starting to learn more about running a successful online business, we were able to build an email list of around 200 email subscribers. Initially, it seemed like things would work out this time.

But when we tried to launch a group coaching program to that email list, the reality hit us. Nobody joined our program. We were disappointed and discouraged, and started thinking that creating online programs and selling them through an email list wasn’t the best way to serve online poker players.

These poker players often got their walls up the minute they felt they were being sold, and they preferred reading forums to blogs.

That was another problem with out blog – we didn’t know how to continue growing it.

We were able to get the initial spike of email subscribers from an online forum we were both already active in, but we soon felt like we had exhausted that strategy. We couldn’t constantly promote our blog through the forums as the administrators of the forum preferred to have their content on the forum, not outside of it.

We thought doing things like guest posting or being on podcasts, but there were almost no websites in the online poker world where we could do that (most of people read a handful of poker forums and that was it).

Eventually we came to the conclusion that this wasn’t a good idea, and at that time I also became more and more tired of working with poker players. I wanted to work with people who were making an actual difference in the world, rather than people who were just taking money from other people who gambled it away.

Together, we made a decision to discontinue that blog as well.

Third time is the charm

At this point, I decided to give Skyrocket Your Productivity another shot. I took the knowledge I’ve acquired over the past few months and decided to really go all out on it.

Eventually, I’ve found a strategy that worked, and my blog started to grow. Within my first year, I was able to grow it to over 2,200 email subscribers:

And I’ve started making some money with it as well.

3 months after restarting my blog, I successfully launched a 2-hour live productivity workshop for $50 to an email list of 500 email subscribers and made 7 sales ($350) with it. A month later, I turned the workshop into an online course and launched it again – this time to a list of 1,200 email subscribers – and made $1,600.

At this point, I knew that there was something there, and I kept working on my online business. Over the next few years, I was able to attract over 300,000 visitors to my website, and earn more than $300k from my blog over the next few years. This was 10x more than I made with my poker productivity coaching business, and 100x more than I made working for 3 months as a programmer in Slovenia at $7/h.

The most interesting part was that I was able to do this in an industry that was already incredibly saturated – productivity for executives and entrepreneurs – and where nobody knew me and considered me an expert yet. I didn’t have a following or connections to start with.

Even though I was far from the #1 expert on productivity, I was able to make a name out of myself, attract thousands of email subscribers, and create online programs that brought in thousands of dollars in revenues.

But the best part about this wasn’t the money. It was the different lifestyle that building an online business allowed me to live, and the things that it allowed me to do that I couldn’t imagine to do otherwise.

Here’s how building an online business changed my life:

I get to work with my dream clients

In my online courses and coaching programs, I’m able to work with some of the top experts in the world to help them start and grow their online businesses.

A few months ago in Chicago, I held a breakfast for some of my students:

The people around me were just incredible people. There was someone working at the World Bank, a celebrity make up artist, a stylist that sells $15,000 dresses, and a world-class songwriter that’s going for a Grammy next year.

I always watching documentaries and reading books from the people who are the best in the world at what they do, but to meet them in person, and work with them together to create their online businesses, is just something I never imagined I could do.

By working with people on such a high level, I know I’m helping create businesses that will impact millions of people in the world – and I wouldn’t be able to meet them or work with them if I didn’t run an online business.

I get to learn from the best online entrepreneurs

Between 2015 and 2016, I worked with Ramit Sethi (one of the top authorities in the online business space) as the lead coach of his Accelerator program where I coached 800+ online entrepreneurs on starting and growing their online businesses:

The best thing about working with Ramit for 2 years was that I was able to see from behind the scenes how he runs his online business. I could see how he develops a strategic plan for his company. I could see how he developed his online programs. I could see how he grew his audience, and how he ran his company.

This allowed me to learn how building a multi-million dollar online business REALLY works, and what it takes to create one.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to meet and learn from other top online entrepreneurs. For example, Selena Soo hosted a private party earlier this year on a rooftop, 50 floors above Manhattan:

It felt like all the top online entrepreneurs were at that party, and I was able to have incredible conversations about the online business industry that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to have.

If I didn’t build my own online business, I wouldn’t be able to meet and work with such incredible people who are really the best in the world at what they do.

I get to speak at conferences in front of hundreds of people

Last year, I spoke at Ramit Sethi’s Forefront event in front of a crowd of 500 people:

Being able to share my knowledge with hundreds of people who are eager to put it into action is just one of the best feelings in the world. Speaking on a stage, and seeing the whole crowd attentively listen, knowing you’ll be able to make a difference in peoples’ lives just feels awesome.

Even a year after the speech (at the next Forefront event) people came up to me and thanked me for the speech and told me how it helped them. That really meant a lot to me.

I get to make an actual impact on peoples’ lives

One of the things I love the most about having an online business is that I get paid for making peoples’ lives better – in big and small ways. A lot of people talk about making an impact and changing the world, but I get to actually see this on a daily basis as I get emails and messages from my clients and readers about how I’ve helped them.

Messages like this:

While it’s nice to have a successful 5-figure product launch or sell out a coaching program, the real joy comes from actually seeing people transform their lives. In my mind, that’s what building an online business is all about. Creating change, not making a quick buck or taking money away from people.

For me it’s not all about list growth and conversions and making money like some internet marketers would like to have you believe. For me, it’s about helping people, then using the money you earn to be able to help more people (while living a better life yourself).

I get to win gold medals

A few weeks ago, I competed at my first powerlifting competition (the national championships in Slovenia) where I won two gold medals:

This wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t have the time to work out for 10-15 hours a week. It wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t have my team of 3 coaches that helped me polish my lifting technique and supported me in my journey. It wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t work with my high-performance coach who taught me how to mentally prepare for the competition.

Sure, I’d be able to still train powerlifting, but from my past experiences with sports, I’m pretty sure I’d have mediocre results like I always did when I didn’t have 1on1 coaches to help me along the way.

I get to enjoy life to the fullest.

Last but not least, I’m just able to experience a cool lifestyle without feeling financially limited.

This summer, I went to visit my high-performance coach Allon in Israel to watch a basketball match on a 2-day notice:

I drove a sports car for the first time in my life:

And I even went on a yacht trip for the first time at a business mastermind in Cancun:

Now these things are all cool and flashy, but the truth is I don’t do them all the time. That’s not my day-to-day lifestyle. On a daily basis, I work from a coffee shop and write emails like this.

But when I do take the well-needed time off, I get to actually do whatever I want to do, instead of being limited by money and going to the same vacation spot year after year like I did when I was a kid.

This helps me fully recharge and come back to work at my best, so I can continue to work on making a bigger impact in the world.

Over the next few days, I’ll share more about how I built my business to 6 figures (and how you can too). And before I do that, I’ll also share the mistakes that I’ve made along the way and things that I thought worked for building an online business, but didn’t.

Keep an eye for a blog post about that tomorrow – I know that if you’re frustrated with growing your own online business right now and don’t know what to focus on and what not to focus on, you’ll love it.

But enough about me… I’d love to hear from you.

If you were able to accomplish ANYTHING in your online business in 2018 that would change your life, what would that be?

What’s most important to YOU?

Is it finally growing an email list of 500-1,000 email subscribers? Getting your first few coaching clients? Getting the first 3 incredible case studies? Launching an online program? Something completely different?

I’d love to hear from you – just leave a comment below and let me know!

-Primoz

Road to 7 Figures: Introduction

By Primoz Bozic 2 Comments

I’ve always wondered what it takes to build a 7-figure online business.

How big does your email list have to be? How do you grow it from 0-5k subscribers, from 5k to 10k, 10k to 20k, 20 to 50k, 50k to 100k? Which methods of growing an email list actually bring paying customers, and which bring people who will never buy from you?

What kind of products should you sell? Is it better to sell $1,000 products or $50 products? How often should you launch them? Should you sell them through “launches” or automatically, behind the scenes? Should you offer coaching and consulting or not?

When is the right time to hire a team? How much should you invest in a team? How much should you invest in yourself, in your business and in your team? And how much money should you save or spend?

I know there’s no one answer to any of those questions, but I always wondered…

What REALLY works? What do online business experts SAY it takes to build a 7-figure online business, and what did they actually DO to build one?

If you take any one online entrepreneur and ask them how they grew their business to 7 figures, they’ll rarely be able to tell you. Not because they wouldn’t WANT to tell you, but because it would take them a long time to actually walk you through the whole process – precious time that they don’t have.

Sure, you can “figure it out” on your own. You can follow them and study what they do. You can listen to their podcasts. You can build relationships with them and ask them about it. You can join their online programs, hire them as a coach or join their elite mastermind to learn from them – and maybe, you can slowly figure it out.

There’s one problem with doing all of this though – there are things people just won’t tell you or share with you that happen behind the scenes. You’ll rarely hear the “whole” story of what REALLY happened. Maybe it’s because they want to keep some “business secrets”, maybe it’s because they don’t enjoy talking about their failures, or maybe they just don’t think about them.

Regardless of what the case is, I haven’t seen anyone actually document the journey of building a 7-figure online business online.

So I thought to myself… Why not me?

And that’s how the Road to 7 Figures was born.

What is the Road to 7 Figures?

Road to 7 Figures is my new project where I’ll publicly document how I grow my online business from 6 to 7 figures and share ALL the details – the good and the bad ones. I’ll share what works, and what doesn’t work. I’ll share my successes as well as failures. I’ll share the good and the bad days, without holding anything back.

I’ll do that by writing weekly updates on my blog (make sure you subscribe to my email list to get them) with one major lesson from each week – as well as a peek into what’s going on in my life. You’ll be able to find these updates and lessons in the Road to 7 Figures section of my blog.

I’ll focus on making these posts valuable for an entrepreneur that’s either starting their online business or who wants to take it from 6 to 7 figures like me (but also fun and easy to read).

When will I complete the Road to 7 Figures?

The challenge will be complete once my business brings in 7 figures in revenue in one calendar year through online program sales, coaching, consulting, etc.

I don’t have a tight deadline for this project and I highly doubt I’ll complete it in 2018. I’d say 2019 or 2020 is more realistic. The reason why I haven’t set a tight or ultra-aggressive deadline on it is that while it’s important for me to build a 7-figure business, I never want to make business decisions where revenue is the primary motivator.

In other words, I wouldn’t want to build a 7-figure business by selling products that don’t work as advertised, doing some heavy discounting, building out an aggressive affiliate campaign or recklessly spending tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook Ads.

For me, it’s more important to build an authentic business that will continue growing for years to come, rather than to try and hit a magical revenue number in a year. So when the challenge is done, it’s done – but I do know that growing my business to 7 figures is inevitable – it’s just a matter of time and putting in the work.

Where am I at with my business right now?

By the way things are moving right now, I’m set to hit around $150k in revenues by the end of this year, which will make it my most profitable year to date. My email list is at roughly 6,000 email subscribers, and the revenue mostly comes in from my Ultimate Guide System program (my flagship program on growing your email list and customer base with Ultimate Guides), 1on1 coaching and group coaching programs. I also have some affiliate revenue coming in on the side.

This year I’ve invested heavily into myself and my business. I’ve worked on refining my business skills, joined a few premium online courses, attended a few events in the US and joined an elite mastermind. I also brought on a new Virtual Assistant that helps me with scheduling and admin work, and I have my girlfriend do all the photos and designs for me.

My goals for next year are to at least double that and get to around $300k in revenues, then move on to $500-$600k in 2019, and to hit $1m in yearly revenues by 2020. I feel like these are realistic numbers based on what I’ve seen other people around me do, but I also know that if I give it my all, my business can grow faster than that as well.

I’ll share more about my strategy for achieving those goals in the future weeks / months.

Why I’ve decided to publicly share my Road to 7 Figures

One of the things that my readers have always asked me about is to share “more of my story” of how I’ve built my online business, so I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while – I just needed to find the right format to do it.

I love doing things in my life and business that few people (or anyone at all) have ever achieved. I just find it exciting to be able to say that I’ve put in the work to do something that most people aren’t willing to put in the work to do. The fact that nobody has ever documented their journey to 7 figures in this way online made this project super exciting to me, so I decided to pull the trigger on it.

With this project, I’m hoping to take you behind the scenes and show you what taking an online business from 6 to 7 figures is REALLY like, and help you grow your own online business with the insights I share with you. One of the most important things for me in life is leaving a legacy, and I believe that publicly sharing my journey will largely contribute to that.

Beyond that, I also know that I’ll want to write a book about my life story someday, and having this journey documented already will be immensely helpful. That way, I won’t have to go back in time and (vaguely) remember how things happened – I’ll be able to share what actually happened, which is nice.

When does the Road to 7 Figures start?

We’re officially starting the Road to 7 Figures next week. In order to get the updates from my journey, just enter your name and email in the orange box below – and I’ll also send you my free e-book where I share the #1 strategy that has helped me take my business to 6 figures in the first place.

-Primoz

My Virtual Thanksgiving: The Awesome People I’m Grateful For

By Primoz Bozic 2 Comments

“Thanksgiving Day is traditionally a day for families and friends to get together for a special meal. The meal often includes a turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, pumpkin pie, and vegetables. Thanksgiving Day is a time for many people to give thanks for what they have.”

-The first search result on Google

I always loved the idea of Thanksgiving, but since we don’t celebrate it in Europe, I never really celebrated or experienced it.

That sucks mainly because I would LOVE to have some of that turkey, potatoes and cranberry sauce. That just sounds awesome.

It also sucks because I feel like I’m missing out on the “thanks giving”, which I do believe is an important part of my life. I always like thanking people who have supported me and helped me get to where I am today.

Since I hate missing out on things, I thought I’d say “screw it”, cheat a little bit, and host my very own Virtual Thanksgiving in the form of this blog post – where I’ll share the people I’m super grateful for this year.

Let’ dive in!

#1 – My kick ass clients, students and readers

Since I’ve transitioned back to running my own business almost a year ago, I’ve had the chance to work with some incredible top performers that are incredibly good at what they do – and helping them start and grow their businesses has been just so much fun and so gratifying.

I love working with people who are already shaping the world to become a better place (from aerospace start up CEOs to celebrity make up artists to world class songwriters pursuing Grammy awards), as well as people who are going to shape the world in the near future through the amazing work they’re doing today.

Breakfast with my students in Chicago

I want to take this moment to thank all the clients that I’ve worked with this year (I won’t share all of their names because I want to respect their privacy), as well as the silent (and less silent) happy readers of this blog who continue to make their lives and businesses better.

One of the things I’m really blown away by is just how many people successfully wrote one or more Ultimate Guides with my help in the past. It’s a LONG list:

  • Nick wrote his Ultimate Guides about monetizing Facebook live, Facebook video ads and strategic email marketing for fitness & yoga businesses
  • Diana wrote her Ultimate Guides about starting a profitable online community and keeping an online community engaged
  • Frank wrote his Ultimate Guides about finding a virtual assistant and productivity for online entrepreneurs
  • Peter wrote his Ultimate Guides about summer style, fall style, creating a minimalist wardrobe, buying a leather jacket and style for beginners
  • Jon wrote his Ultimate Guides about doing a handstand and doing your first backflip
  • Allon wrote his Ultimate Guide about high performance (and has another one on mental toughness coming out soon)
  • Chris wrote his Ultimate Guide about a perfect morning routine
  • Jerome wrote his Ultimate Guide about stopping binge eating at night (and is working on another one on intermittent fasting)
  • Camille wrote her Ultimate Guide about getting a date without going online
  • Iris wrote her Ultimate Guide about creating a business casual wardrobe (for women)
  • Matej wrote his Ultimate Guide about finding more time and energy to start a side business (and is working on the second one about deep, focused work)
  • Audrey wrote her Ultimate Guide about meal prep
  • Jonathan wrote his Ultimate Guide about setting up your website yourself (and is working on his second guide about setting up an autoresponder sequence)
  • Jim wrote his Ultimate Guide about RxJava for Android developers
  • Maria wrote her Ultimate Guide about stopping binge eating for good
  • Charles wrote his Ultimate Guide about writing 1,000 words a day
  • Jesse wrote his Ultimate Guide about switching careers to big data
  • Tree wrote her Ultimate Guide about surviving emotions for empaths and highly sensitive women
  • Katsumoto wrote his Ultimate Guide about lens design
  • Ryan wrote his Ultimate Guide about getting a TED talk this year
  • Rusty wrote his Ultimate Guide to best animation schools
  • Eanna wrote his Ultimate Guide about indie photo book publishing
  • Martin wrote his Ultimate Guide to losing your first 10 pounds (in Slovak language)

Plus, there are tens of other guides in the work from my students and readers (and many that I probably didn’t hear about yet).

Just seeing this makes me so happy. Ultimate Guides aren’t easy to write. Most of them are 10-25,000 words long, and take 50-60 hours or more to create. The fact that so many people are spending so much of their (already limited) time to create such amazing content for their readers makes me so happy, because I know we’re really contributing to the world together by sharing great information in a world of internet noise and crappy content.

I also love that we have Ultimate Guides out in the world from so many different industries… From fitness to programming to animation and indie photobook publishing. It’s not just guides about online marketing.

If you’ve ever written an Ultimate Guide with my help… THANK YOU. It means a lot to me. And if you haven’t let me know about it yet, do let me know (email me or leave a comment below). If you want to learn how to write one, click here to get my free Ultimate Guide to Writing Ultimate Guides.

And even if you haven’t written an Ultimate Guide or aren’t planning on writing one, I want to thank you for being a loyal reader of mine – if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be writing this blog.

It’s true that I love nerding out on Ultimate Guides (because they work), but I also love writing about other aspects of online business and being a business coach for top performers – because I love sharing my advice with people who will become the future online influencers and change lives of millions of people.

So thank you for being here – whether you’re my student, 1on1 client, or a reader. I appreciate you.

#2 – My mentors

There are 4 major mentors whose advice has really shaped my business this year (in no particular order).

Selena Soo

I’ve met Selena through Ramit Sethi’s Zero to Launch program a few years ago, and she’s since become a good friend and mentor of mine. I’ve learned a ton from Selena, but there are a few things that really stand out to me.

Nobody puts the care that she’s putting into everyone who she works with (from clients to business partners) like Selena does. She treats every person as if they were her lifelong friend, and really puts her relationships first. Watching Selena run her business has helped me put a lot more care into how I run my own business, and it’s definitely shown in the relationships I was able to build with my students as well.

Selena has taught me a ton about how to to get more media attention for my business, and I really do consider her the #1 expert on publicity in the online business world. Her program Impacting Millions is hands down one of the best online trainings available, and it’s incredible to see how many success stories she’s able to produce from the students that join it. She’s also helped me connect with some major influencers in the industry through her events (like her business anniversary party), which I really appreciate.

Hanging out with Selena at her business anniversary party in NYC

The one thing that few people see if they don’t know Selena well is her drive to continue improving every aspect of her business. Even though she’s created Impacting Millions a few years ago, she’s still regularly working on improving it and making it an even better program. I admire that determination to continue to improve her program until she really can’t make it any better, and because of her approach I’ve adapted a similar mentality in my Ultimate Guide System as well.

Selena has made a huge impact on my business this year, and I’m so grateful to have her as one of my close friends.

Ramit Sethi

Talking to Ramit at his Forefront event in Chicago

Ok, you knew this one was coming. Ramit has had a huge influence on my business over the past few years, and if it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I would have created my own online business. I’ve also worked with his company to develop his Accelerator program between 2015 and 2016, which has helped me experience through my own eyes what building a multi-million dollar business looks like.

The most impactful thing I’ve learned from Ramit this year came from his Forefront event (see my lessons from Forefront here).

Going into Forefront, I wasn’t exactly sure what I should focus on in my business next, and I decided to have a quick conversation with Ramit about it. We had a conversation about changing my writers voice (since I knew that my voice became very similar to his over time as I followed him), and he helped me understand how to develop my own writers voice and run my own business in a way that I want to, and not necessarily the way he would want to.

That lifted a huge weight off my shoulders, and I’ve definitely started running my business in a different way now. I’m no longer worried about what one of my mentors might think when I write something or create a product, and instead focus on the things I want to write about and create, as well as the things that my audience wants me to create.

This has been extremely liberating, and made running my own business a lot more fun. As Ramit likes to say, “I’m the CEO of my own business”, and I was able to go from knowing that to living that.

Derek Halpern

Hanging out with Derek at Selena Soo’s party in NYC

If I had to name one person that has helped me improve my business skills this year, it’s definitely Derek.

Derek’s online courses (I wrote about his Sales Page That Converts on my blog) have been hands down some of the most deep and detailed courses on the internet, and include a wealth of phenomenal information. Since I’m very self-driven, it’s not a problem for me to go through tens of hours of videos and hundreds of pages of worksheets on my own.

His Sales Page That Converts has taught me how to write better sales pages, his Blog That Converts has opened my eyes in terms of long-term strategy for building a blog audience and writing viral content, and his Yes Engines is helping me learn how to create better sales funnels for my online programs. Every single course I’ve taken from Derek to date has been exceptional. I’ve also used his Zippy Courses platform to host all of my online programs, which has been of huge help.

Since I loved Derek’s courses so much, I recently joined his high-end mastermind, where I got to experience how he runs his online business and learned how to work on some of my biggest weaknesses that will help me take my business to the next level.

I don’t think Derek necessarily gets the credit for being a brilliant business mind (as he’s often known for his hilarious YouTube videos), but from taking his courses I know that for the super self-driven people, he’s a great guy to turn to for business advice.

The other thing that people might not know about Derek is that he has a huge heart – he really deeply cares about people. Whenever I reached out to him for help, he was there for me, and I really deeply appreciate that.

Allon Khakshouri

While I’ve learned from Ramit, Selena and Derek over the past few years, this year I’ve found a new mentor that has made a huge difference in how I approach my business and life.

Hanging out with Allon and his wife Naomi in Israel

His name is Allon Khakshouri. Allon is one of the best tennis managers in the world (he’s managed three of the world’s #1 tennis players, including Novak Djokovic), and he is an incredible high-performance expert. As Allon got the idea to teach high performance to business owners, I immediately raised my hand and told him I wanted to work with him.

I knew that I wanted to become the best in the world at what I do, and I turned to Allon because I knew he could help me do that. At that point I didn’t know just how life changing working with Allon would be. I can say that he’s been hands down the most influential person in my life this year, and helped me become a better business owner, athlete and a person.

Allon has taught me how to perform on a higher level and show up as the best version of myself – both on a day to day basis when I work on my business, and on huge days like my powerlifting competition.

He taught me how to get more work done, focus on the right things in my business, constantly learn and improve my skill sets, develop confidence, grit and mental toughness, recover better, improve my relationships with my family and even how I handle my finances.

One of the highlights of my year was visiting Allon in Israel for a few days where we went to see a friendly basketball match between Slovenia and Israel, where I got to explore Israel and it’s beaches, and where we had some incredible conversations about business and life.

I know that Allon is teaching the skills that will help me become the best in my industry, and I know he’ll be one of the major online influencers in the high-performance world in the very near future.

#3 – My best friends

I consider Marc and Diana two of my closest friends, even though our friendship is mostly virtual.

Hanging with Marc and Diana at Forefront in Chicago

Marc and Diana were my teammates while I was working at Ramit Sethi’s Accelerator program, and since that we still chat on a daily basis. I really consider them two of my closest friends, and I turn to them for all the day to day ups and downs, as well as reach out to them for help when I get stuck.

The thing I love the most about Marc and Diana is that they’re two of the hardest working people I know, and they’re both working on their own amazing projects behind the scenes that will be HUGE for them next year – and it’s just so awesome to be a part of their journey.

Of course I love them for selfish reasons as well. Building an online business on your own is hard, and having friends to support you day in and day out through the good and the bad times just makes it a ton easier (and more fun).

Marc and Diana, if you’re reading this, I really appreciate having you in my life – and stay awesome in the future as well!

#4 – My powerlifting trainers

The moment when I was the most proud of myself this year was winning two gold medals at my first powerlifting competition.

This was a crazy experience where I pushed through injuries, losing 30lbs over a few months, tens of hours of workouts each week, and hundreds of hours of mental training. It was one of the hardest and most gratifying moments of my life.

I know this wouldn’t have happened without all 3 of my trainers that support me day in day out. They help me get better at lifting, improve my mentality, push myself beyond my limits, and keep going when things get tough. They’re also there for me all the time when I need their help, which I appreciate.

Having them in my life is not only helping me become a better athlete, it’s also helping me apply what I learn in lifting to other areas of my life, and make me more mentally tough when I work on my business. They often don’t get the credit for the behind the scenes work they do, but they’re a huge part of my life.

#5 – My family

My girlfriend Aida is the person who needs to put up with my shit day in and day out (like going to basketball matches):

She’s also always there for me when I need her and helps me out when things get really tough. She’s also a kick ass photographer and takes care of most of the photos and design for my website, e-books and courses. Most importantly, she’s the one person that never takes my BS and reads right through it, which helps me be a better person.

And, she makes sure I don’t just work 24/7 and actually spend time on things that matter to me beyond just business.

I’ve also gotten a lot closer with my family this year (hugely thanks to Allon’s advice):

Fun fact: my family name translates to “Christmas” so we like to dress up as Santa Clauses for Christmas

It was so awesome to have my whole family be there for me when I won my powerlifting competition, and it’s great to have them in my life where they support me when I need their support, even if they don’t necessarily understand what this online business thing or powerlifting thing is all about :).

Bottom line is – I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for all of these awesome people – from friends, family members, to mentors, readers and everyone else who’s reading this.

Today, I really just want to say thank you for being a part of my journey. I appreciate you.

What about you? Who are you grateful for today?

How to be Confident

By Primoz Bozic 22 Comments

When I was in high school, I was always the quiet, why, and not very confident kid. I was often the kid that sat by himself in the back row because nobody wanted to sit next to me.

I would only admire my schoolmates who were more confident and likable, while I would wonder “how can I do that too?”.

Today I’m a completely different person than I was in high school. I’ve pursued all the things I really wanted to pursue in my life (from running my own 6-figure online business to having a hot girlfriend to winning 2 gold medals at my first powerlifting championship).

Now I’m no longer the person that hides in the shadows, and love being in the spotlight and confidently speaking in front of hundreds of people:

In order to get to where I am today, I NEEDED to develop the unshakable confidence that would allow me to take massive action towards my goals and dreams. Today I’m going to show you how I did it, and how you can become more confident in your business and personal life as well.

Let’s dive in!

Without confidence, it’s next to impossible to build an online business

Let’s face it, building an online business is hard.

It requires a TON of putting yourself out there.

From writing articles and releasing them to the world, to creating online programs and charging thousands of dollars for them, to pursuing big media opportunities and even hiring a team – all of these decisions require confidence.

Without confidence, you’ll always get stuck in the thinking phase and progress slower than a snail with your business. Think about it – have you ever met a super successful person that WASN’T confident in their abilities? It’s unlikely, because they probably wouldn’t have taken the action that would allow them to become successful.

With confidence, you’ll be equipped with a jetpack that will allow you to fly over the hurdles and challenges in your way of building your own online business. You’ll be able to escape the endless overthinking loop, confidently take action and even wonder what’s taking others so long to build their own businesses.

But developing confidence isn’t easy, especially since most of the advice on confidence is not all that helpful.

Why conventional advice on confidence building is wrong

If you ever googled “how to become more confident”, you’ve likely ran into one of the article with “25 tips to become more confident”.

Usually they talk about something like this:

  • Dress better!
  • Do power poses!
  • Groom yourself!
  • Exercise!
  • Think positively!
  • …
  • …
  • …
  • Buy a unicorn!

When I read those articles, they always make me roll my eyes because I know they make people FEEL good, but they don’t actually help you become more confident. Which makes sense to me, since these articles aren’t really written to help people, they’re written to attract more views to different blogs and media outlets. It’s sexier to say “do these 25 sexy and easy things” than “do this one hard and boring thing”.

If you’re reading this post about confidence and you’ve read some of these articles, this likely means that those articles didn’t help you a whole lot.

Why is that?

Well, because things like dressing better, grooming yourself or putting on cologne CAN help you feel more confident in the moment… But you’ll likely forget them in a few days and won’t turn them into a habit. Or, they’re things like “exercise more!” which people won’t start magically doing after reading an article about 25 tips on confidence.

They also don’t address the root issue behind why you’re not confident, which we’ll address today.

The real reason why you lack confidence

You don’t lack confidence because you don’t dress well, don’t clean your desk or don’t do power poses. I know plenty of people who are super confident and don’t do any of those things. I also know people who are super confident even though they don’t exercise frequently, volunteer regularly, or have a pet unicorn.

Now here’s the deal – the reason why most people won’t tell you why you’re not confident is that it’s not sexy, it might hurt your feelings, and it can’t be fixed in a few minutes by putting on a nice blazer and a pocket square.

Most people these days will give you “quick solutions”, because they say that “nobody wants to do the hard work”.

Well, I’m not like that. I know you’re reading this blog because you’re a top performer (or you want to become one), and you’re not afraid to put in the work. In fact, you WANT to put in the work, you just need someone to tell you what ACTUALLY works so you know what to do without wasting your time on things that don’t.

Ok, so the real reason for why you’re not confident is…

*drum roll*

You’re not doing the things you said you were going to do.

Yep.

The real reason why you’re not confident about building a business is because you said you were going to write that blog post last week and you didn’t.

The real reason why you’re not confident in putting on 20lbs of muscle and getting a six pack (or a flat stomach and a toned butt for the ladies) is because you said you’d go to the gym regularly and stop snacking, but you didn’t do any of those things.

The real reason why you’re not confident about your speaking skills is because you’ve said to yourself that you’ll go to a public speaking class that you never went to.

I know this might sound harsh, but it’s the truth. And I know you’d rather hear the truth than some feel good motivational tactics.

When I lacked confidence in high school, it was because I never acted on the things I really wanted to pursue. I wished I was more social and that I could make more friends, but I never picked up a book about social skills or even googled how to become more social (until I was a few years in college).

I dreamed of being a world-class athlete but I never actually pursued the sports I wanted to pursue, put in the work or took the initiative to get the right coaches to help me learn a new sport well. Instead I spent hours and hours playing video games at home – no wonder I didn’t have many friends.

Everything changed once I learned how to run my own business, which is when I first experienced what I call Exponential Confidence.

How to develop true confidence with the Exponential Confidence Technique

If we said that you lack confidence because you’re not doing the things you said you were going to do, then how can you become more confident?

It’s simple – you actually do more of the things you said you were going to do, and you’ll become exponentially more confident over time.

Here’s what I mean:

If you look at The Exponential Confidence Graph above, you’ll see that the more you follow through with your goals, the more confident you’ll become.

For example, if you say you’ll write and publish a blog post this week, you’ll become slightly more confident in your ability to create regular blog posts. If you do this for 4 weeks in a row, you’ll really feel like you can do this. And if you create weekly blog posts for a YEAR, it will be really hard for you to NOT be confident in your ability to create regular blog posts.

The same applies to anything in life – from going to the gym, to improving your social skills, to getting better at sports, public speaking, dating… You name it.

The more you consistently do what you said you were going to do, the more confident you’ll become over time. That’s why successful entrepreneurs are confident in their abilities – because they’ve put in so much work it would be hard for them NOT to be confident. That’s why top athletes are confident in their abilities – because they’ve spent their whole lives training to become the best in the world in their sports.

I call this phenomenon Exponential Confidence.

Exponential Confidence means intentionally following through with your goals for a longer period of time in order to become exponentially more confident.

The key here is to acknowledge that while you WILL get a confidence boost after the first few weeks of following through with your goals, the unshakable confidence that you’re seeking will develop over time as a result of this process, rather than magically happen overnight. And that’s exactly why most of the “confidence hacks” don’t work, as the initial boost you get from them quickly drops off

Now here’s the interesting thing about the Exponential Confidence concept.

If you consistently fail to follow through with your goals, then your confidence will get gradually lower and lower over time.

This is what I see in most people who get “stuck” with running their online businesses. They set big goals for themselves, they don’t follow through with them, then get discouraged. They get ideas in their head, stop themselves from pursuing them, and get even more discouraged. Within a few months, they go from feeling excited about their business to feeling like they can’t really do this, and often “move on to something else” or say that “life came in-between”.

The same thing happens with going to the gym. If you’ve ever said yourself that you’ll go to the gym regularly but then didn’t go as many times as you wanted to, you became less and less confident about your ability to go to the gym regularly, and you eventually stopped going, just like every year beforehand.

Eventually, we lose all of our confidence and move on to new pursuits in our life.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Even if your confidence levels are pretty low right now, you CAN build them back up relatively quickly with every consistent action you take towards your goals and ideas. In other words, every time you successfully do what you said you were going to do (to yourself or to others), your confidence will grow.

I see this happen all the time to myself, my clients and my friends.

The Exponential Confidence Case Study: How Diana Started Kicking Ass

One such example is my close friend Diana Tower, who has been absolutely kicking ass lately in her business. She’s close to finishing her second Ultimate Guide this year, she’s written some amazing posts recently (like this one about her experience at the Forefront event), and she’s recording a new, exciting podcast behind the scenes that’s unlike anything that the industry has ever seen.

As she started putting herself out there more and more, people actually started reaching out to her to hire her as a consultant or a coach, which is something that didn’t happen to her before. Now Diana is the most confident in her business that I’ve ever seen her, and she’s also the happiest she’s ever been.

Why is that?

Because she started acting on her ideas.

I know she had this idea of a podcast for a while, but she kept putting it off. As I was supposed to be one of the first guests on her podcast, I annoyed her (like a good friend does) to send me that scheduling link so we could record the episode.

As soon as she sent me the link, she put the wheels into motion. She came up with some awesome podcast questions, scheduled interviews with over 20 people in her network, and has already recorded quite a few of them. As she started working on these podcasts, she also started writing new content that she was excited about, and more and more people started to hear about her over time. And as more and more people heard about her, people started reaching out to work with her.

All because she actually acted on her ideas and followed through with them.

Becoming more confident really is that simple. You don’t need hacks or techniques or to spend hours and hours talking to a coach about confidence. You really need to just do what you said you wanted to do and follow through with it, and the confidence will come.

Now let’s talk about how YOU can apply the Exceptional Confidence Technique to your life and business as well, so you too can become more confident in your skills, abilities and yourself.

From Theory to Action: How to Apply the Exponential Confidence Technique to Your Business (and Life)

You already know how the Exceptional Confidence Technique works, and at this point there’s only one thing left to do: to put it into action.

On a meta level, this is a great opportunity for you to become more confident in yourself as well – you spent 5 or 10 minutes reading this article with the intention to become more confident. Now you have a choice, either you can read it and forget about it (which will make you less confident that you can actually take action on the advice you learn), OR you can take action on it, and take that first step to becoming more confident.

So to put this technique into action, all you need to do is three things:

1. Set yourself a small goal for next week related to your business or personal life that will help you build up your confidence (writing a blog post, going to the gym 3 times this week, or sending out one guest post pitch)
2. Follow through with it
3. EVEN if everything in your life goes wrong (your car breaks down, your girlfriend dumps you or you get stick), STILL follow through with it

The task doesn’t need to be executed perfectly. It’s more important for your confidence to get it done, than to not get it done because you’re trying to make it perfect.

You’ll be amazed at what this does to your confidence, ESPECIALLY if following through with the goal won’t be easy. Because if that’s the case, and you follow through with it anyway, you’ll also develop mental toughness along the way which helps you confidently conquer bigger and bigger challenges in your business and life.

After the first week, the rules are simple.

First and foremost, make sure you always follow through with what you said you were going to do, even if that means just committing to doing LESS. It’s better to commit to doing less, build up your confidence and momentum than to commit to doing too much and lower your confidence while killing your momentum.

Second, you can use your newly found confidence to gradually pursue bigger and better goals and ideas, which will in turn give you even more confidence once you accomplish them. Soon you’ll be taking advantage of the Exponential Confidence principles and you’ll wonder how come you even struggled with confidence in the first place.

And what if you don’t manage to follow through with your goal that you set for yourself? Ask yourself WHY you didn’t follow through with your goal, and if time or energy was the issue, set yourself a smaller goal for next week.

If something else was the issue, address the issue – but make sure things like “my car broke down” don’t take your focus away from your goals. When things aren’t perfect, these are perfect opportunities to train your mental toughness by following through with your goals anyway.

That’s it! You know what to do – write down that one thing you want to work on next week, then make it happen no matter what.

So tell me – what’s the one goal you can take action on next week to build up your confidence?

P.S. You might have noticed some incredible 10/10 art doodles in this post – I drew these myself. I know they’re super random, but I’d love to know what you think of them. Do you love them? Hate them? Should I make more of them?

Leave a comment below to let me know!

-Primoz

7 things that are wrong with online courses (and why you don’t need to buy more of them)

By Primoz Bozic 7 Comments

I used to absolutely love online courses, and when I first started learning about building my own online business, they opened my eyes in terms of how building an online business actually works.

They took me behind the scenes of what building an online business looks like, and taught me how to do everything from finding a profitable business idea to creating online products, selling coaching services, writing copy for my business… And for a long time, the majority of my education came from going through online courses.

I especially loved when top influencers in the industry would create new courses that I could join as one of their first students, as I knew they would pay extra attention and do anything in their power to help me succeed with them. When the courses were still pretty small and had private, intimate communities where everyone knew each other, they were also amazing for meeting other cool people and getting great feedback for your business.

Unfortunately, the industry has long evolved since I first joined online courses. As it’s easier than ever to create online courses nowadays, even people who aren’t real experts can create courses and sell them. The courses that I’ve joined years ago that had communities of 500 people now have communities of 10,000 people.

Because of this the quality of online courses and their communities dropped dramatically. They weren’t these amazing opportunities to get help with your business any more, and instead became huge knowledge banks that most people never go through (more on that in a sec).

With the evolution of the online course industry, something interesting began to happen. Many people reported their sales of online courses dropping over the last year, which resulted in revenue losses and even layoffs at certain companies.

It almost seems like the online courses industry is crashing and burning.

Is that really true? And if yes, why?

Here’s what experts say about the downfall of online courses

The experts I’ve talked to around this topic are in unison – what used to work isn’t working any more. The course sales are dropping. The email open rates are dropping. The influencer marketing (getting influencers to share your content) isn’t working as well any more, which makes it harder to drive traffic to your website.

Many of them blame the industry for becoming saturated, and the consumers becoming more and more immune to marketing and online courses. I think there’s truth to that, and I do think that the market is evolving, like any market evolves.

It was probably easier to sell Coca Cola when it was the only drink of it’s kind or when it just had one major competitor than it is today when every supermarket sells it’s own brand of coke and diet coke.

Still, I think most experts are missing on HUGE thing…

And that one thing is the REAL issue that few people talk about and address.

The ones that do see their businesses grow and flourish like never before. The ones that don’t see their business attract less customers day by day.

Here’s what I think the issue is.

The success rate of many online courses is catastrophic.

I’ve seen online courses that have tens of thousands of students in them with only a hundred or so successful students. I’ve seen online courses from new online entrepreneurs that had 20 people start the course and only one person finish them. I even created courses myself that most of my students would start but never finish.

Now just to be clear, when I’m referring to “online courses”, I mean the recorded online courses where you get access to online materials and then you’re supposed to go through them on your own (or you have a HUGE Facebook group with them).

The problem with these courses is that they’re huge piles of information that most people just don’t work through on their own. It’s like trying to complete a major at a university without actually having access to live classes and by just self-studying and watching the recordings.

Are SOME people capable of self-studying through online courses? Sure. But how many?

I know I’m one of them. I’m super self-driven, and don’t have a problem with going through online courses on my own (though this is becoming with the limited support these days, even for me).

I’ve finished most courses I’ve started and even wrote about that in my Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Star Student in Online Business Courses.

But here’s where I’ll be honest – I was the exception, and not the rule.

I also didn’t just go through the courses on my own, I often reached out to peers and mentors to help me be successful with my business. I often had that advantage of being one of the first students that joined the course and getting extra treatment.

So for a while, as I saw other people around me complain about online courses, I shrugged it off. I thought the problem was in THEM, not in the COURSES. I hate to admit this, but I had my eyes and ears shut for years. I thought “well, people are just lazy and not putting in the work – or trusting the process”.

But then, as I started building my courses, I realized I was wrong. I worked with other people who were top performers like me, and I realized that even though they knew all the information, they still needed extra help from an expert to keep them moving – just like I do. I know that taking online courses isn’t enough for me, which is why I joined an elite mastermind this year and have my own coaches who I talk to every week to further grow my business. OCH blog may be a great help in this respect.

And what happens when people don’t get the right support? They start online courses, work through a few modules, get stuck / fall off track and never finish them. They might even say “it’s just not the right time for me”.

It’s not that they’re not top performers. They just aren’t getting the support they need.

Which then results in a 1-2% completion rate of online courses.

So what makes me angry about all of this is… Almost nobody is talking about it or addressing it.

It feels like everyone just sweeps the success rate of online courses under the rug and hopes that nobody will ever find out about it. They accept it as a given fact and move on to building more courses.

They might also blame their customers for their low completion rate. They say that their students just aren’t serious enough. They aren’t trusting the process. It’s not the courses’ fault, it’s the customers fault. They never think about how to actually improve their courses. Instead, they accept that a 1-2% completion rate is normal and “focus on things that will help them move the needle for their business”.

Another huge problem is the “evergreen funnels” that funnel people into the online courses. Evergreen funnels are automated processes that you never see in the background which artificially tell you that the course is open and closed within certain dates and create fake urgency (the opening and closing of the course is triggered based on when you subscribe to their email lists).

Why do people do this? Because it essentially means that they sell their courses automatically and make money while they sleep. It’s every entrepreneur’s dream, and “the holy grail of online business” – passive income.

I was guilty of this in the past as well, because I was taught that that was how things were supposed to be done. I sold my own online courses on autopilot and made thousands of dollars each month without moving a finger.

Until I had enough of it.

This year, I stopped selling my online courses in the background and sacrificed thousands of dollars in monthly revenues.

Do you want to know why I did that?

Because it didn’t feel right to me. It wasn’t in line with what I believed in.

It didn’t feel right to be selling online courses to people, then seeing them never finish them. Why would I want to take money from someone without really doing my BEST to help them out and helping them get their money worth?

When I asked others in the industry about how they deal with this, a lot of them would say “Yeah, the completion rate of evergreen funnels is way lower. That’s just how business works”.

I disagree. I think we all have a choice that we make.

We can all close our eyes and pretend that we’re building an amazing business, claiming that it helps millions of people of all over the world… Or we can create products and services that actually deliver on the promise.

This is the non-sexy part of starting and growing an online business – making sure your products and services really deliver the result that they promise. But even though some people SAY they do that, they don’t really do it, because this takes a lot of time and has no clear direct ROI. They would rather use the time, energy and money to do things that do have a clear ROI.

I’m sure we’ve all gone through courses where we’ve seen 90% of people stuck on a part of the course – and that problem was never really addressed.

It’s like a hole in a ship that never gets fixed. At first, you can ignore it. Maybe you can even ignore it for a long time. Until, at one point, the ship sinks. And this is exactly what I think is happening to the online course industry – people are creating courses full of holes, people find out about that, and their ships start to sink.

The REAL reasons why you aren’t finishing (or getting the most out of) online courses

Let’s look at these “holes” in more detail, because they’re the exact reasons why you might not be seeing the results that were promised to you from them.

I’m doing this not to say all courses are bad (they’re not), but to show you that that the problem why your business isn’t growing as fast as you would want it to grow isn’t necessarily in you, but in the way these online courses are designed.

Later on in this post, I’m also going to show you two better ways to learn about growing your business, that I’ve found much more effective than online courses.

Let’s dig in.

Reason #1 – The “sticking points” are never removed from the courses

Every course I’ve ever taken has one or more sticking points where the customers get stuck.

Maybe that sticking point is customer research. Maybe it’s doing an audit of your business to see where you can make potential improvements to it. Maybe it’s finding the right niche for your business. Maybe it’s sending out pitches for guest posts and podcast interviews. Maybe it’s hiring your first team member.

These are all places where I got stuck in online courses in the past, and I’ve seen thousands of others people get stuck as well.

It’s natural for your course to have sticking points in the beginning, and it’s natural that it takes some iterations to really remove these sticking points from the course. It’s like that with everything – if you flew an airplane when they first invented it you had more chances of dying than surviving. Through years and years of gradual improvement, flights are now the safest way to travel.

The problem occurs when sticking points in the courses are never removed – for years at a time. The problem occurs when online entrepreneurs create courses from which they never remove the sticking points, keep selling those courses, and move on to creating new courses.

For you as a customer, that sucks because you’ll likely get stuck without any way of getting un-stuck. Which means you’ll spend $2,000 on a course you’ll only complete 10% of – and even worse, feel guilty about not completing.

Which brings me to the next point.

Reason #2 – The communities of online courses are mostly useless for getting help and feedback

While there are some bright exceptions, most of the online communities these days are either:

  • A ghost-town where nobody ever posts anything
  • Full of other people who are stuck at the same point as you (so they can’t really help you out with your problems)
  • Not the best way to get great feedback from the course authors (as they rarely answer questions or give detailed, useful feedback)

I’m sure that you’ve seen a course community like this before where the group has 10,000 or 20,000 members, and every time you ask for help you either hear crickets or get a bunch of contradicting advice from people you’re not sure you can trust, a couple of “feel good” comments or just plain bad advice.

Even with the course authors that have the best intentions, it’s hard to really get great feedback from them once the group grows to thousands of people. If they wanted to answer all the questions from their students (and answer them well), they would have no time for growing their own business.

So the reality is that the course authors aren’t really active in the community, they pop in quickly after each major launch to answer a few questions and make it seem like the community is active, or just consistently refer you to the course materials. In the best case scenario, they hire coaches or student mentors to help you out, but those cases are rare (because they often don’t see the value in it, and the cost of offering extra coaching can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year).

So if you join an online course, you’re on your own most of the time, unless you’re really proactive in building relationships with other top students from the course (which is what I did in the past) or hiring a coach to help you out.

Reason #3 – The top students in the courses aren’t taken care of

Whenever I go to my favorite restaurant, I get treated insanely well. Every request I have gets taken care of, I’m made feel at home, and the chefs or waiters even throw in a special surprise on the house for me once in a while.

That’s how I feel like every business should treat their best customers – but the sad reality is that many online entrepreneurs don’t take care of their best students that way. I’ve seen many top students go way above and beyond in helping the entrepreneurs, from helping out their fellow students to referring new students to their programs… Only to not feel very appreciated in return.

The feedback they send to the course authors doesn’t get implemented, they don’t get their questions answered once in a blue moon when they do have them, and then they wonder why they’re even trying so hard to bring more customers to another person’s business.

What happens next?

These top performing students slowly leave, stop spending time in the communities, and the communities lose the most valuable members from them, which then removes even the 1-2% of the people who can give great advice in these communities from them.

Again, there are bright exceptions, and I’ve seen some people like Selena Soo go WAY above and beyond for their best customers by bringing them media opportunities, inviting them for private dinners etc. – but these exceptions are rare.

If more people treated their best students like the restaurants treat their best customers, I’m sure they’d have much better and stronger communities. And if they listened to the feedback from their top students, they’d be able to fix the

Reason #4 – They make promises they can’t deliver on just to attract more customers

It’s much easier to write amazing sales copy that promises that everyone can grow or build their online business than to create an online course that actually delivers on that.

Building an online business is hard, and I don’t think that it’s for everyone. From what I’ve seen, people who tend to be very scattered and overwhelmed in their lives pretty much never successfully finish online courses (because they have other problems in their lives preventing them to do that). I’ve also seen that people who have “no business idea” are far less likely to be successful with a course than people who already know what they want.

It’s no coincidence that the students who are usually the most successful with online courses usually have clear ideas of what they want, and usually have some kind of background and experience with running a business in the past.

The problem in my opinion lies in the fast that the copywriters who write copy that sells online courses want to write the best possible copy, make HUGE promises, and do everything they can to get more sales of the course (which is their job, so that make sense in a way). As they do this, they usually try to address all the concerns from their audience to let them join the course.

No business idea? No problem. Feeling overwhelmed? No problem. Not sure what kind of a business you want to build? No problem.

But is there REALLY no problem?

I think there is a problem. I believe it’s misleading to try to convince people that you can help them and sell a course to them when you look at the data and see that almost nobody in the course that you’ve built has finished it successfully that was overwhelmed in the beginning, didn’t have a business idea, and didn’t know what kind of a business they wanted to build.

This is one of the reasons why the course success rates are so low – because many people, sometimes even unintentionally, make promises they can’t deliver on in the copy. The other negative side-effect of this is that if you feel your community with overwhelmed, scattered people, that’s bad for the whole community – as the quality of questions and the advice in the group will drop, and make it less attractive for your best customers who won’t be able to resonate with these new people.

Of course I understand why people do this – to bring in more revenue. It’s easier to write copy for the course and let more people in than it is to justify spending time improving the course or limiting it only to the top customers. In the short run, this might even hurt your revenues. But in the long run, I’ve seen that people in the industry who are killing it right now do just that – they select amazing clients, which brings in more amazing clients over time.

As a potential customer, you’ll actually be better off joining courses that make smaller promises and only let the right people in, than trying to join courses that are massively appealing and have let in tens of thousands of people.

Reason #5 – Completing courses usually takes WAY longer than expected

Have you ever taken a 4-week or an 8-week course that took you months or even YEARS to complete?

I know I have. I appreciate the fact that the courses are broken down (and not delivered all at once), but from what I’ve seen they aren’t broken down ENOUGH. If a course really takes a year to complete, and you position it as an 8-week course with a 60-day refund period, you’re setting the wrong expectations for your students and setting them up for failure.

If you do this, you’ll give people the IDEA that the course is supposed to be completed in 8 weeks, and when they don’t complete it, they’ll feel like they’re falling behind, and eventually give up (which again leads to the low completion rates).

It’s amazing how much of a difference in success rate you can see by breaking the course down to a REALISTIC time frame, making it as long as it needs to be for people to finish it, and setting the expectations for them right.

This is what we do in my premium program called Ultimate Guide System – I clearly tell my students that even though I can write an Ultimate Guide in 1-2 weeks, most students who have full time jobs and families will take around 14 weeks or slightly more to successfully finish their first guide – because that’s the average I’ve seen my students take in the past. We even break the coursework down to 14 weeks rather than 4 or 8 weeks for that reason, so that the students get the exact information they can actually take action on each week.

This is one of the major reasons why Ultimate Guide System has a 50% success rate, a super engaged community, and actually brings my students results – because I refuse to make promises I can’t deliver on, and tell my students things as they are and what to expect.

Unfortunately most people don’t do this, which is why you’ll feel like you’re falling behind the course pace, when really you’re just falling behind an imaginary course pace that is realistic for 0.5% of the students (if not less) who usually run their businesses full time anyway.

Reason #6 – Many online courses are losing the depth that they used to have

I recently joined an online course that I was really disappointed by, and it’s the first online course I ever refunded.

The course was supposed to cover a specific part of running an online business in great detail, but in reality it was just a few short videos without any specific information on HOW to actually execute on it.

As I went through this course, I was puzzled, and thought to myself, “is this really it?” and “what’s going on?”. It didn’t make sense to me why a premium online course would lack the depth and stick to such surface level concepts. I know I wasn’t the only person feeling this way either as I’ve seen other people have the exact same experience with it.

To me, in the moment, this made no sense. Why would someone build a premium course and NOT make it super detailed and useful for someone like me?

Then it hit me. I realized that this was an attempt to make the online courses more manageable and digestible for the people that are overwhelmed with them – so they could consume it easier.

While I see how that could work in theory, the problem with this approach is that while more people might be able to digest the course, they won’t take a whole lot of value away from it. The mistake I believe people are making here is that they are trying to make the course materials more digestible to fit the masses, rather than expanding the course, keeping the awesome materials in, and serving their best clients better.

Since I’m a customer that craves depth, great information and is willing to put in the work, this was actually offputting for me – and just reassured the idea that I really don’t need to buy more online courses. I don’t need to finish courses to feel good and like I’ve learned something new, I want to finish courses so I can get the results they promise.

Reason #7 – Evergreen funnels make customers feel like they’re late to a wedding

I’ve introduced the idea of “evergreen” funnels before and explained that these are sales funnels that are automatically triggered when someone signs up to an email list and allow people to join courses even when they’re not officially open.

Evergreen funnels were a big thing in the industry over the past few years, and a lot of people started using them to better leverage their time. I mean why wouldn’t you want to automatically bring in more sales to your business if you can?

Now I don’t think evergreen funnels are always bad – I think they’re perfect for smaller, easily digestible courses, e-books, etc. that don’t really need a huge time commitment. But when you try to sell a premium online course on autopilot your customers feel like they’re “late to a wedding”, which makes it harder for them to be a part of the communities and decreases the chances of them following through the courses.

I’ve spoken with people who sell premium courses this way and the verdict was clear – way less people who join the courses through evergreen funnels actually finish them than the people who join during the live launches where they at least get the feeling of doing the course together with other people.

Does this mean that this is the end of the era of online courses?

Well, the bad news is that the data really does show that the course sales are going down, which will be bad news for people who will just try to build more courses without taking a look at how they can increase the success rate of their customers.

This is also bad news for you as a consumer, as you might see that a lot of people will try to churn out more and more courses to make up from the lost revenues that weren’t on the level that they used to be (because developing great premium courses takes a ton of time).

On the other hand, the people who will learn how to adapt to this state of the market will be able to continue to grow their businesses – but they’ll have to start rethinking the way in which they currently create their courses.

The good news is that there is good news as well – both if you’re trying to create and sell online programs and if you want to take advantage of them to grow your business.

What we can do as online entrepreneurs to build better businesses

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve stopped using evergreen funnels to sell my online courses. I also stopped selling a few online courses which weren’t on the level I would have wanted them to be, had too many holes, ghost town communities and didn’t get my students the results I wanted to get them.

Instead I’m focusing on programs that DO work and DO get my students incredible results.

One example is Ultimate Guide System – my one year program on creating Ultimate Guides. Ultimate Guide System is different from the online courses these days in the sense that it includes a 14-week intensive training plus one year of support through additional live coaching calls. It has a small but incredible community of top performers that can actually give other students great feedback on their work.

The course is done LIVE (we have weekly 60-90 minute live coaching calls), and I’m also very active in the community and constantly available to help my students out when they need my help. I also make it a priority to frequently check in with and take care of my top students. And beyond that, I constantly keep an eye for “sticking points” in it and strive to improve it to a point where there’s no sticking points. This is the non sexy part of running an online business.

The fact that the majority of my students are loving the course, finishing it, seeing results with it and recommending it to other people is not an accident. It’s all well thought out, and I strongly believe that this is the most effective way to build an online business that makes a big impact nowadays.

We have to stop building recorded, passive income courses and start building incredible live programs that actually get our students results.

Yes, this will take considerably more time than whipping something together, selling it and forgetting it. Creating incredible programs takes months, or even years of planning, research, testing, talking to customers, and refining courses. And it takes a lot of personal involvement from the author, at least initially (until you can actually guarantee results without your involvement).

We need to stop SAYING we are putting the success of our customers first and actually DO IT.

I believe that if we manage to do that, we might suffer revenue losses in the short run (like I did when I stopped selling some of my courses). But after we go through this dip, we’ll build a foundation for a business that we can run for years or even decades, where we’ll be able to establish ourselves as the top experts in the industry.

We’ll need to adapt to what our customers actually want, be willing to ask for and listen to their feedback, and take care of our best customers like we would take care of our best friends.

If we manage to do this, our business will slowly but steadily grow. If we fail to do this, we can keep trying to release new products and services, but if we just try to increase the amount of courses we create, the quality will drop. And when the quality drops, we lose the trust of our customers. And that can ruin our business.

We have a choice to make. Either we ignore this situation and blame the market… OR we can take a deep, honest look at ourselves and see what WE as online entrepreneurs can do better.

Now, to answer the question: Do you really need more online courses?

I do think recorded online courses can be valuable, especially if you are super self-driven or if the courses are short and around small topics that you can really learn and implement over a few weeks.

But if you’re trying to build an online business and want to get deep expertise around topics like copywriting, growing your email list and creating great content, you might be better off with joining a live program (similar to an online course, but delivered live with Q & A sessions, feedback sessions, etc.) like Ultimate Guide System, by getting a coach to work on your business with you 1on1, or joining a group coaching program.

I know I’m doing the same thing myself – I’ve stopped investing in online courses and am instead focusing on getting 1on1 coaches that are insanely good at what they do and joining the masterminds where I actually get personal access to top online entrepreneurs.

That’s it for today – I know this was a bit of a controversial post, but I also think we need to start having this kind of conversations and starting to build better businesses. I hope you’ll take some things away from this post that will help you invest in yourself more wisely in the future and if you’re building your own online business, build a much better online business that actually changes lives of millions of people.

What about you? Do you agree with me or disagree with my stance on online courses today?

Let me know by leaving a comment below. I’m really curious what you think.

-Primoz

P.S. Everything that we talked about today applies to creating amazing free content for your customers as well. If you want to learn more about building a kick ass business, download my free e-book on growing your business by creating the best free content in your industry (through the box below).

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